Louis Stern Fine Arts

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present a selection of paintings by Frederick Wight (1902-1986), painted in the last decade of the artist’s life. The works represent the culmination of an illustrious career spent writing on, exhibiting, and advocating for art and artists as a celebrated educator and art gallery director. Upon his retirement in 1973 from a 20-year directorship of the art gallery at the University of California, Los Angeles, Wight was able to fully devote his twilight years to his own artistic practice.

“I suppose that I would have been a good transcendentalist 100 years ago,” Wight proclaimed in Time Magazine in 1956. This philosophical vein pulses through these meditative paintings, which center the possibilities of mystical experience and spiritual discovery through the revelatory medium of nature. Rendered in agitated brushstrokes and hallucinatory colors, Wight’s landscapes capture the dreamlike wonders and cruel extremes of the deserts and coastlines of Southern California. The yawning vistas of the region and the relentless, searing intensity of its sunlight are infused with an otherworldly charge, offering a spiritual conduit for reflection on the matters of human frailty, resilience, and mortality.